Kevin Drum asks a good question about the status of consensus in philosophy

My question is this: is it safe to say that there is a clean, precise, and widely agreed upon belief that there is no subject in the philosophical world on which there is a clean, precise, and widely agreed upon belief? Or not?

I think not, because there are some areas in logic where there are clean, precise and widely agreed upon, if not consensus, beliefs. For instance, Tarski’s definition of truth for quantified sentences in terms of variable assignments is I think clean, precise and widely agreed upon. (Notable dissenters include the Montagovians who decry the use of variables. But I think this is widely agreed upon in philosophy, even if it is a little more contentious in linguistics.) And the definition of identity as the smallest reflexive relation I think is clean, precise and widely agreed upon (cpwa, for short). And the definition of propositional validity in terms of truth-tables is cpwa, at least outside Australia and Holland.

I now expect howls of protest from people working on quantifiers, identity and/or propositional validity.

To the extent that the answer is yes, that’s because topics cease to be “in the philosophical world” once a cpwa conclusion is reached. How to analyse velocity used to be a philosophical topic, but now that we can define it as derivative of position wrt time, there is less philosophical energy spent on it. Indeed, what little philosophical work (i.e. work by philosophers) on velocity there is tends to be looking for ways in which the consensus view might be mistaken. There’s generally little point in writing long papers sticking up for cpwa beliefs.

Finally, and this is really a cheating answer, if we look through we find lots of areas on which there is today a cpwa belief. For instance, there is a cpwa belief about Plato’s epistemology, Anselm’s theology, Bentham’s ethics, Bradley’s ontology and Ayer’s theory of mental content: they are false.